The Theology of Spiritual Disciplines and Where It May Lead Undiscerning Women

by MelbaToast · February 26, 2025

Spiritual Disciplines and this idea of Spiritual formation are making a comeback. A new generation of Spiritual Masters are entering in the church and, unbeknownst to many Christian women, are bringing in destructive teaching that undermine Scripture and may even lead women into a false gospel ultimately shipwrecking their faith. Teachers such as John Mark Comer, Ruth Haley Barton, and Tyler Staton have ministries being implemented by local churches to help their congregants in discipleship.

And so Spiritual Disciplines are brought into the church under the guise that they are important “tools” used for the Spiritual Formation necessary for discipleship.

John Mark Comer on the acceptance of “spiritual formation” in ministry today.

Give churches a resource that claims to help people be discipled and tell its users that Spiritual Disciplines are essential to discipleship, maybe even claim the lack of these practices are why Christians are not living the way they should, and you have a hook to bring them into false teachings. It’s very simple…Scripture isn’t enough, we need what they are selling to assist us with discipleship. And so because of these claims many leaders over the local church’s women’s ministry may choose to use these parachurch resources to help the disciple their women by training them in Spiritual Disciplines for their spiritual formation.

Spiritual Disciplines comes with a certain type of theology. But the theology used to encourage people to use Spiritual Disciplines for discipleship/spiritual formation (basically what Scripture calls sanctification) contradicts what we see in Scripture about how God’s people are brought near to Him through the Gospel and sanctified by God Himself through His complete word as found in Scripture (2Tim 3:16-17).

The Theology behind Spiritual Disciplines

The God of Spiritual Disciplines

The theology behind the Spiritual Disciplines starts with a different God. A god that can be found in nature and humanity. Through contemplation and introspection one can come to know this god. This is Panentheism.

And ultimately what panentheism does is fashions a god after our own imaginations rather than one plainly given to us through His objectively revealed word. Scripture becomes simply a gathering of books written by men who had their own encounter with God. God is still revealing Himself, our job is to unify ourselves with who we imagine to be god.

This is mysticism.

Mysticism is the belief “that one can have a relationship with God, not by means of revelation, or by the ordinary religious channels but by introspection and meditation in conjunction with a purified life culminating in the awareness that the individual partakes of the divine nature” (What is Mysticism?). Spiritual Disciplines start with this as a foundational belief because they are the means that are supposed to bring you into a relationship with the god that one can know by looking within.

The Nature of Man According to Mysticism

Mysticism rejects God’s written word on the sinful nature of man. With mysticism, we are not born with the nature of sin that causes us to suppress the truth in unrighteousness. But man has the ability to know God by contemplation and looking inward and that starts with the heart. Those deep truths found within our heart cannot be wrong. No, forget that God has revealed to us that our hearts are deceitful above all things and desperately sick that one can’t even understand it (Jer. 17:9). From it springs forth all sorts of evil things (Mark 7:21-23). Even after receiving a new heart from God, our desires are now set to truly know and trust God, it still takes God’s written revelation about himself to renew our minds and the submitting of our hearts to it that will cause us to be conformed to Christ (Ephs 4:22-24). Many false teachers want you to look inside and contemplate what your heart is telling you; believing God resides there, when they should be teaching you to look to Scripture to conform the heart, change our desires, and walk by faith in Christ’s commands.

Scripture claims that God is transcendent, and is holy unlike His creation. We can observe creation and get a glimpse of His power, but to know the character of God we must go to God’s special revelation of Himself (the works that He does/did combined with what He has said about Himself). And the clearest revelation of God by God himself is Jesus Christ. If we learn from Him and know Him we know the Father, Christ is the final revelation of Himself (Heb. 1:2), because He is the perfect representation of God. All the fullness of deity resides within Christ (Col.2:9). And the beautiful thing about the Gospel that Spiritual Disciplines undermines is that by faith we received the perfect righteousness accomplished through Christ. If we are clothed with Christ we are clothed in God’s righteousness, we are simply called to, by faith, walk in that righteousness. While, in stark contrast to this, Spiritual Disciplines call you to have faith that these practices will help you fulfill the law of love, accomplish a righteousness of your own, and believe that God is well pleased with you because you are developing a relationship with Him through practicing the disciplines.

The Nature of Salvation According to Mysticism

Because God can be found by observing and contemplating creation this includes man, then the more we connect with the divine within the more “human” we become. Learning to love the divine humanity leads only to loving oneself more. But mystics would agree with this and say this is the solution to mankind’s problems. Humanity should know just how much God loves them, cherishes them, and created them to have a deep intimate relationship with them. If they only knew how much they were loved they would love God and love their neighbor. While this is true for the repentant Christian, Mystics believe in a meaning of love that lacks justice and righteousness and does not take into account that sin has corrupted humanity’s very nature. Sin causes us to love the self so much that we will, apart from God’s own intervention, adamantly reject crucifying the sinful passions and desires because we love ourselves through our sin. Our love for ourselves can become so twisted by our sin nature that we may even use God to justify our sin as Adam did when he blamed God for giving him Eve as his excuse for why he was led into sin (Gen 3:12).

The mystic god behind Spiritual Disciplines has less of a call to crucify the flesh and reject our sinful desires and have more of an emphasis on connecting with the divine within to be reconciled to him and evolve humanity. Salvation of this world comes when all humanity knows this god within and his great love for them. While the Disciplines themselves become the way one “crucifies the flesh” becoming a light form of asceticism. Things such as seeking silence, stillness, meditation, giving, Sabbath, etc all become a discipline used to deprive our bodies of something (noise, thoughts, money, activity, etc) as a means to develop an intimate relationship with God and hear from Him.

“The disciplines are activities of the mind and body purposely undertaken, to bring our personality and total being into effective cooperation with the divine order.Yet even as we reach for more grace to this end, we also learn by experience that the harmonization of our total self with God will not be done for us. We must act.”

(Dallas Willard, The Spirit of the Disciplines, Understanding How God Changes Lives, pg. 68)

Spirituality and Our Relationship with God According to Mysticism

The reason Christians are urged to put spiritual disciplines into practice is because people believe certain false teachings regarding what it means to be “spiritual”.

That spirituality involves a union with God that is determined by how one feels instead of trusting in God’s written word. A union with God is accomplished by our works (more specifically through the Spiritual Disciplines, or in Charismania, through hearing God’s voice and self surrender to it’s directions) instead of being brought near to God through Christ’s work and becoming one with God through His written word (John 17:22-23).

Proof that we are unified with God is by being “spiritual” by which they mean always feeling the presence of God, or always hearing and being led by God through being “in tune” with the Spirit. Scripture doesn’t call us to being “spiritual” in this way, but instead calls us to be “Spirit FILLED”. The fruits, or proof, that we are Spirit filled is our walking by faith in the Gospel in which we are doing all things for God’s glory (1 Corin 10:31) always praising and thanking Him (Eph 5:15-20), the putting to death of the flesh (Rom 8:5-14), resulting in the fruits of the Spirit (Gal 5:16-26). A child of God becomes more in union or one with God through God’s word (John 17:14-23); abiding in God’s word and walking by faith obeying God’s word, not through seeking out such subjective experiences and inner impressions through the practice of the disciplines.

Another false teaching on spirituality is this belief that one NEEDS to be emptied of oneself to be filled with the Spirit. This sounds very pious. But the Spirit doesn’t work like that. He works with us, first bringing us faith, then bringing us understanding of God’s word and all the spiritual blessings that come with Christ’s work in the Gospel (Ephs.1:3). He then works in us to live by faith in these blessings producing fruit in us. He works with ourselves, he changes our desires which changes our thoughts, which changes our character, which changes our walk. It is all the Spirit’s work, which doesn’t involve an emptying, but a conforming, again a call to be filled and submit to Christ’s commands. If one believes that one needs to be emptied of themselves the question then is, how do we do that? Well, that is the proclaimed impetus behind Spiritual Disciplines; that they help you to empty yourself to be filled with God. And the more you are filled with God, the more you can fulfill the law, the more you can love, the more you can do the “hard things”.

Scripture does talk about being “filled”, but it’s not some amorphous filling by any spirit. We all are filled by one “spirit” or another (or even many). We are to test the spirits (1John 4:1) to see if they are from the Holy Spirit. Spirits testify either of Christ or antichrist; teaching things that either exemplify and point to Christ and His work or draws one’s spiritual “eyes” to a different Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. Spirits that go untested against the very words of the Holy Spirit who exclusively testify of Christ, can cause women to leave the way in which the Lord [their] God [commands them] to walk. (Deut.13:1-5). And the spirit of mysticism found within the teachings of Spiritual formation draw one’s spiritual “eyes” to look inward, to the self, instead of to Scripture. To be filled with the Holy Spirit is to be filled with His words, therefore testing all other spirits against it. Every person is “spiritual” and exercises a form of spirituality, the questions are: “Is our spirit living or dead” (John 3:1-14; Eph. 2:1-10)? Have we been spiritually born again? Is our spiritual life and our spiritual growth abiding in and being conformed to the Holy Spirit or another spirit?

Unfortunately, “Spiritual” disciplines will conform you to a panentheistic “spirit” formed subjectively by one’s own imagination rather than the Spirit we find from Jesus Christ in His written word.

This short article by no means touches on every aspect surrounding the disciplines, spiritual formation, mysticism and Christian mysticism. But it has looked at the more obvious problems within this movement. If you are interested in gaining more information on this topic, please feel free to access the links below.

In this short series below I dive into how the arguments made by the spiritual masters for WHY we need Spiritual Disciplines undermine the sufficiency of Christ’s work and His word. They are all we need to bring us into an intimate relationship with God. I also tackle where Spiritual Disciplines may lead the faith of undiscerning women through what the actual “spiritual” masters teach and believe. I have also included other links to resources addressing other problematic teachings and practices that come with Spiritual Disciplines and the theology surrounding mysticism.

May this series bless you and bring glory to God!

MelbaToast

Host of Thoroughly Equipped